
As you can guess, Walmart paid less for these socks - volume does that in all business. We’d sell to a small retailer for $3.69, with a MSRP of $5.99. That’s the total cost to us, including freight. These would cost the company roughly $2.49 a unit, landed from China. I remember one of our most popular sellers at the time was white athletic ankle socks that sold in a six pack. A huge part of my job was delivering bad news, and it was largely because of Walmart. My role was a business-to-business (B2B) account specialist, dealing with smaller regional department stores and mom-and-pop shoe stores. When I was first trying to become a writer, typing away on nights and weekends, my day job was working for a mid-level apparel company. We deify billionaires as capitalist geniuses in America without caring about the ethics at play. It’s important to discuss this, because fans deserve to know who their owners are and understand their motivations. I know this, because I dealt with it first-hand. It’s a complicated ballet of manufacturing and wholesale maneuvering that pre-Amazon allowed Walmart to have a monopoly on retail in the United States, and it’s a model Amazon simply duplicated. The grift has been to make people believe they’re the smiley-faced denizens of rolling back prices, without anyone really diving into how they’re able to do this. Punishing the little guy and passing it off as a boon has largely been Walmart’s entire business model. And before you think this would never happen, consider the shared DNA of the people involved here. The real question is why nobody across the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS and MLL thought to protect fans from a scenario where the Walton family could choose to drastically raise ticket prices, or leverage their hold on sports in the area to damage fans - and there wouldn’t be any reasonable competition in the market. Sports teams being sold are billionaires trading chips to other billionaires so they can take their money and do other billionaire things. you guessed it, Stan Kroenke.Īcross the state’s sporting landscape nobody thought to have a chat and say “maybe it’s not great to give one family this much power in a major market?” That’s before we get to how weird it is to have Rob Walton own the Broncos while his cousin’s husband owns the Rams. As recently as 2021 the Denver Post floated the idea of the Rockies being sold, and on the list of potential owners is.
Walmart monopoly empire pro#
The only remaining pro sports franchise in the state not owned by part of the Walton family are the Colorado Rockies, but don’t worry - there’s speculation there too.

Walmart monopoly empire professional#
Should the sale of the Broncos to Rob be finalized here is what the professional sports landscape in the state now looks like: The Broncos could diversify the NFL’s ownership, but nepotism is getting in the way Between the three of them the Waltons and Kroenkes are set to control almost everything in the state of Colorado when it comes to pro sports.

Rob is a direct heir to the family fortune himself. Stan Kroenke married into the family through Ann Walton and built a sports empire fueled by Walton money. While it’s not uncommon for one owner to have several teams in the same market, it is wholly bizarre to have a family dominate like the Waltons have in Colorado. The undercurrent of this, outside of the NFL, is that the Walton family now has an almost unparalleled stranglehold on Denver sports. The $4.5 billion bid is almost guaranteed to be accepted by the league, signed off on by owners, and ensures another old, white, male billionaire joins the ranks of team ownership. The winning bid for the Denver Broncos was placed by Rob Walton, the oldest of the Walton children and part of the Walmart dynasty. If you were hoping the NFL would stick to its promise of trying to bolster diversity in its ownership group, I’ve got some bad news.
